Fearless and Free

by Wendy Sachs

American Management Association     2017

226 pages     Nonfiction

The subtitle of Wendy Sachs' excellent look at women and their careers is: How Smart Women Pivot and Relaunch Their Careers. In it, Sachs tells her own story of the multiple iterations of her career and encourages her women readers to be creative, resilient, and passionate about their career choices and career plans.

In story after story, Sachs shows how women create opportunities for themselves—or seize opportunities—and shine in whatever career they choose. She suggests that in today's world, opportunities abound for the determined, creative woman. She also asserts that most women will have several careers in their lifetimes, with agility being a must-have skill. She says:

"This book is for women at all stages of their professional journeys. Some may be looking for a total relaunch. Others are trying to reposition themselves to stay relevant. Still more may be looking to get back into the game after taking time off to raise kids and need the confidence and direction to take the first step." 

I kept seeing my daughters, step-daughters, and daughters-in-law in the context of the book. They are all attempting to be resilient, relevant, and challenged.  Actually, I saw myself as I figured out what career would best meld with my life as a widowed mother of three. Then, what I would do after I retired from my education career. Actually, I have made 4 different career moves in the years since I retired. 

At the same time that Sachs is telling all these wonderful and inspiring stories, she is also telling women about how to be successful in a male-dominated world. Her story about Hilary Clinton is a case in point, and it is certainly something that all the women in the country observed in this last election. The question kept coming up, "How is a woman supposed to act?" I appreciated her advice, for example, to stop apologizing all the time. Just tell it how it is.

Well, for sure, the world of women is changing rapidly, and Wendy Sachs and her book should prove inspiration for an entire new generation of women who must be agile enough to take advantage of the change as it happens.

About the Author

WENDY SACHS is the author of Fearless and Free (AMACOM; 2017) and a master of the career pivot. An Emmy-award winning TV news producer, Wendy has worked at Dateline NBC, Fox, and CNN. She also worked as a Capitol Hill press secretary, public relations executive, CNN contributor, content strategist and editor-in-chief of Care.com. In a more random role, Wendy appeared as the on-air spokesperson for Trip Advisor. A frequent speaker, Wendy has written about work/life and women’s issues for multiple publications, including The New York Times, CNN.com, the Huffington Post and Refinery29. She has appeared on dozens of radio and TV shows, including Good Morning America, NBC's Today, Fox and CNN’s Headline News. Wendy lives with her husband and two children in South Orange, New Jersey. For more information, please visit wendysachs.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom: A Complete Prescription to Optimize Your Health, Prevent Disease, and Live with Vitality and Joy

by Acharya Shunya

Sounds True    2017

376 Pages     Health/Wellness

I would like to share with you this morning a very insightful and useful book that came across my desk from a publicist. It is available today.

Ayurveda is a health system that believes that true health is everyone's birthright, and that each of us is a self-healing entity who can use nature's abundance to restore and renew ourselves. The practitioner and author, Acharya Shunya, was born in northern India, where her formative years were spent learning the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda from her guru, who was her grandfather (or Baba). He was a spiritual teacher and practitioner of this ancient wisdom. 

Shunya now is a practitioner herself, in California, and her book, Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom, is the result of her years of work teaching people how to understand, use, and practice the Ayurveda philosophy. Acharya Shunya presents a narrative-based guidebook that meticulously covers the how-to's of morning and evening self-care, daily contemplations, self-massage and skin care, cooking (including recipes), beauty rituals, and more. It also talks a great deal about yoga.

She writes "To rid ourselves of the suffering that afflicts the body, mind, and soul, what we need is an affirmative knowledge of life and how to live it in alignment with nature."

I loved the stories that begin each section. In them she relates the enormous influence her Baba had on her by giving examples of conversations she had with him as a child and the wisdom he imparted to her.

This is truly a unique book. It certainly can't be digested in one sitting, but it looks to me that someone seeking its wisdom needs to work on it, one step at a time.

Here  are some steps that every reader can do.

  Wake up early each morning at a set time. 

  Have an altar in your room and put fresh flowers on it every day. 

  Every morning meditate to your healing for fifteen minutes. 

  Stop eating (or minimize your consumption of) harmful foods - which foods are harmful, and which foods are best eaten at certain times of the day and the year are discussed throughout the book 

  Eat beneficial foods - there is a big section toward the end of the book that discusses food and includes recipes.

Here is a review in a blog about health and wellness.

Here is Acharya Shunya's website.

Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis

by J.D. Vance

HarperCollins     2016

264 pages     Memoir

I began seeing J.D. Vance on the news circuit in the weeks prior to the election. He represented the white working class voters among the pundits and the talking heads on CNN and explained to television audiences why his "people" voted for Donald Trump. He was an eloquent spokesperson for the conservative voters that the "liberal elite" have had a hard time understanding. In an interview, he said, "for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of a life we left behind continue to chase us."

He begins Hillbilly Elegy by saying that he finds it ludicrous that anyone would be reading his book, because he hadn't done anything "great in his life." But those of us reading his book find that he has done something quite remarkable. He has laid bare the life of the working poor in a way that builds understanding and acceptance. 

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, just up the road from my sister's house in West Chester, Ohio, but it might as well be a world away. Vance's family moved en masse from Kentucky to work in the steel mills of Middletown, making more money than they could have in the hills of Kentucky, but then the jobs went away and misery ensued. The strong social ethic of the hills stayed with those transplants, and that social ethic continues to be the driving force in their lives.

Vance was raised by his grandparents and an older sister because his mother couldn't get her life together enough to care for him. His grandparents fiercely protected him, pushed him, prodded him, and threatened him. “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.” He nearly didn't graduate from high school, but following graduation, he enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq. Following his military service, he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School. Today, at 31,  he is a business executive, married and living in Silicon Valley.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance tells the difficult story of his upbringing,  and as he probes for us (and even more importantly, for himself) how he survived and figured out how to thrive, we liberal intellectuals begin to understand how those people around us, like J.D. and his family, came to feel disenfranchised and thus elected a billionaire populist to the presidency. My husband said that the book helped him understand why Michigan's rural areas went pretty solidly for Trump.

I asked my husband what he had learned from reading Hillbilly Elegy. He said that he was struck by the intense loyalty Vance feels for his family, for his grandparents (both now dead), for his sister, and even for his drug addicted mother. My husband said he respected so much how Vance could look beyond the pain of his upbringing to understand the circumstances that caused it. For instance, Vance ponders how some members of his family built stable families, held decent jobs, and maintained sound economic foundations, while his mother floundered so badly. My husband inferred, however, that there is just as much potential for painful upbringings in the lives of "so-called intellectuals" as there is in the white working class. 

At the same time that Vance speaks about how much he loves his family, he is highly critical of those people who feel that they have little control over their lives. He concludes: “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest god----ed people on this earth. But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. . . . I don’t know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

My husband and I read Hillbilly Elegy aloud, and we like everyone else we know who read it, greatly appreciated its lessons for us. We highly recommend it for its readability and its life lessons. It is easy to see why it has remained on the bestseller lists for so long.

Review in Washington Post.

J.D. Vance website.

Books for the Inauguration

My five-year-old granddaughter said to me the other day, "I watched Donald Trump on television when my mommy wasn't looking." Like she was watching porn or something!. This is an extremely sad state of affairs when a five-year-old isn't in awe of the president-elect or respectful of the office.

In this inauguration week, I want to highlight two new books I received from the publishers that speak to what I am feeling and what many in this country appear to be feeling. 

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America

Edited by Dennis Johnson and Valarie Merians

Melville House   2017

224 pages     Nonfiction/Politics

Leading liberal and progressive voices speak to the chaos brought about by the election and now the inauguration of Donald Trump in the book of essays, What We Do Now. For example, in one essay,  David Cole, the legal counsel for the ACLU asserts that because Trump was elected, we must now hold him accountable. He says, "But if we now and for the next four years insist that he honor our most fundamental constitutional values, including equality, human dignity, fair process, privacy, and the rule of law, and if we organize and advocate in defense of these principles, he can and will be contained." 

There are essays by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem, Dave Eggers, Cornell Brooks and many others, each essay discussing some aspect of American freedom and a blueprint for how to move forward. Progressivism, as we well know, has been dealt a huge blow, and progressives all over the country are still stunned two months after the election. These essays provide tremendous food for thought on how we can and must proceed.

  

My favorite is an essay by author George Saunders called The Braindead Megaphone, which comes from a book by the same name. (By the way, many of the pieces in the book have been published elsewhere.) He says,

"Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He's not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he's got that megaphone." And people listen.

Every essay is appropriate and thought provoking.

The Trump  Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You

Hoped Would Never Happen.

by Gene Stone

Day Street Books     2017

208 pages     Nonfiction/Politics

In The Trump Survival Guide, Gene Stone gives liberals and progressives a call to action for the next four years. He begins with an historical guide to the actions of ineffective presidents of the past, and offers concrete solutions to  help those of us in despair to find ways in which we can actively be watchdogs to hold Trump and his administration accountable for the decisions that will be made in the next four years.

Stone looks at important policies of the country through several lenses—the history of the policy, what President Obama did regarding the policy, what President Trump might do, and what the average citizen can do to support, and in some cases save,  the policies that are important to them. He discusses civil rights, the economy, education, women's rights, immigration, the environment and several others. The chapters that interested me the most personally were the chapters on education, immigration, and women's rights. I particularly liked all the contact information that individuals can use to become active advocates for the policies that are most important to them. 

As for me, I am going to continue to be actively involved in immigration reform and women's rights. My little five-year-old granddaughter and her mother are going with me to the rally in Lansing, Michigan on the day after the election. My daughter, step-daughter and teenage granddaughters will be in Washington. We cannot remain silent.

The Woman in Cabin 10

by Ruth Ware

Scout Press     2016

340 pages     Thriller

It was a dark, very cold and snowy January day when I began The Woman in Cabin 10. I was all wrapped up in a blanket, the fire was blazing, and I was determined to put life at bay and read something totally absorbing. This was the perfect choice. What was good about The Woman in Cabin 10 was that I couldn't put the book down. It isn't great literature, but it sure did keep my heart pumping and my blood warm.  I had similar hopes when I read Ware's previous book, In A Dark, Dark Wood—and I was similarly underwhelmed, except to say that the setting is just as atmospheric in The Woman in Cabin 10 as it was In A Dark, Dark Wood. This time, however, the setting is a small cruise ship in the North Sea. 

Laura Blacklock (Lo to her friends) is a travel writer and is lucky enough to score a trip on the maiden voyage of the small ship, Aurora, to view the Northern Lights, to visit the Norwegian fjords, and the city of Trondheim. There are only ten cabins, and all but cabin 10 are filled with travel writers, photographers, and potential investors for the ship's owner, British Lord  Richard Bullmer. 

Before the voyage began, Lo experienced a robbery in her apartment; the most scary part of the robbery was that she was locked in her room for several hours. This event throws her completely off balance, so she enters the cruise ship sleepless, hung over, and anxious. We learn right away that she is an unreliable reporter, that she has a drinking problem and is dependent on anxiety medication. Almost immediately she is rattled again when she thinks that she hears a scream and someone being thrown overboard in Cabin 10, right next door to her room. Of course, no one believes her. It is a classic murder mystery setup, but in Lo's case, she cannot cease pursuing what she thinks happened, even when she is warned to stop searching for answers. Add to this the claustrophobia and the constant nausea coming from the lurching small ship, and you have a prescription for a very tense ride.

One reader suggested that the book involves a lot of gaslighting. I didn't know what that term meant, but apparently it refers to when a hysterical woman is manipulated into thinking that her own memory, perception and sanity can't be trusted. No matter how much the people on the boat try to gaslight Lo, she persists, and solves the crime. The last 50 pages or so are very tense, but the solution is a bit underwhelming and slightly disappointing. 

One of the problems I have had recently is finding anything to like about the women protagonists in mysteries that seem to be very popular. Certainly, I didn't like Rachel in The Girl on the Train, and Amy in Gone Girl, and I really didn't like the women In a Dark, Dark Wood. Now, here is another one with a truly unlikable protagonist. But, apparently they make great characters in movies, since all of these books have been made into movies. Probably The Woman in Cabin 10 will show up on the big screen as well. Ah well. So much for my opinion. 

Ruth Ware website.